The Thirty Day SHTF Test Diet: Day 29

Today was Day 29 for my test of Mountain House food packets as emergency food, The Thirty Day SHTF Test Diet. Lots of preppers recommend storing food for a disaster; this series tests it out. As detailed earlier, this diet has turned into a weight-loss diet too.

It's the second last day, and I'm moving towards the end of this test in much the same condition I was going through it. Again, no health effects or signs of famishment over and above a growling stomach. The food's quality is still the same as a heated frozen entree. My "binge reading" continued, shifting mostly to Steemit posts in my feed, and has turned a bit into "binge commenting." My weight dropped, although I expect the latest drop to be cancelled out by a rebound after the diet's finished.

Today's Meals

As disclosed already, I've become quite the night owl with an early-night extended nap. Around midnight, I felt real pangs of hunger that I had to bull through, so this time I frontloaded the breakfast to allay that hunger instead of just to send myself off to sleep.

The breakfast in question was the Scrambled Eggs with Ham and Peppers:

Since it requires boiled water, I added the cup, stirred a few times and waited less than ten minutes to get it ready:

As with all of them, the eggs were fluffy enough and the rest tasted like decent-quality processed food.

The dinner was Rice and Chicken:

As with the eggs, I added boiled water - two cups for this one, stirred and waited the ten-or-so minutes for it to reconstitute:

There's a lot of rice in this variety, and the rice absorbs a lot of water. That's why it turned out semi-solid rather than saucey like most of the other dinners.

It tasted like it looked: rice, spicy and a bit salty, interspaced with chicken chunks - both white and dark - and a few veggie chunks.

The rice meant that the calorie count is a bit on the high side, as the Nutrition Facts box on the right shows:

Since the values on the right are per half pouch, the rice dinner clocks in at 820. That's more than double the egg breakfast's 380. The dearth in vitamins in yesterday's was made up today - but this combo has a lot of sodium. If memory serves, the eggs-rice combo has the highest total sodium of all the breakfast-dinner combinations. If not, it's close.

As noted above, my weight dropped a fair bit from yesterday:

but I'm sure this'll be reversed after I'm through.

Effects, So Far:

Expanding on just above, I've been around the dieting block before. I still remember "last hurrah" drops that reversed themselves once I went back to normal eating. Even if, the visible effects of this regimen show. My belly has visibly shrunk from what it was a month ago.

The drop today combined with the hungries late last night show that I'm in one of those no-pain-no-gain phases. As said above, no noticeable health effects but the recent "binge reading" could be a device to deal with stress. Since I've been spending a lot of the time on Steemit, it's hard to say that the binge-reading is bad. :)

Conclusion

One day to go, and I've racked up a drop today that will likely reverse itself once this diet ends. That's why I'll wait until my final wrap-up post this coming Sunday to deliver the number of pounds lost: doing so will capture the rebound, at least most of it.

Even with that anticipated rebound, I'm on track to lose twenty pounds in a month. That's pretty good for a one-monther that did not resort to the usual crash-diet foods.

Thanks for reading.

And feel free to comment below!

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